It’s the season of summer roadtrips!

We’re indulging the anticipatory itch for travel and the open road with a look at the marketing tactics from two companies that have disrupted the transportation industry: Uber and Lyft.

Competition In The Sharing Economy

It’s no secret that these two companies are competitors. Both are major players in the transportation sector of the sharing economy, where the once-privatized privilege of owning a car has been turned on its head. Despite the good-natured sound of this market, neither company is willing to share customers.

The price war waging between these two taxi-alternatives has become something of a Shakespearean drama. Between Uber’s sleek, black branding and air of elitism, and Lyft’s playful pink mustache and best-friend-on-wheels vibe, these two companies couldn’t look more different.

When it comes to their digital marketing tactics, we put our platform to work to take a look under the hood (so to speak) with an Uber vs. Lyft analysis.

Social Media Showdown: Uber vs. Lyft

Looking at their social media following, Uber has Lyft beat two times over on both Twitter (119,059 followers vs. 45,108 at time of publication) and Facebook (334,952 fans vs. 151,774 at time of publication). However, Lyft is working over-time to make up the difference.

Take a look at our platform’s head-to-head comparison of Lyft’s and Uber’s global accounts on Facebook and Twitter over the past 7 days:

While Uber has more followers, Lyft is outpacing Uber in both daily follower growth (0.33% vs. 0.21%), the number of tweet per day (6 vs. 0), and average retweets per tweet (2.95 vs. 0).

Again, this is our platform’s head-to-head overview from the past 7 days, and in that time, Uber did not tweet at all from their global account. On Twitter, it could be that Uber has lagged on tweeting from their parent account in favor of more Twitter communication from their city-specific accounts. The account for our city headquarters in Washington D.C., for example, shows a more consistent tweeting schedule.

On Facebook, Lyft’s David vs. Goliath approach is even more pronounced. Given its greater fan following on the network, Uber has a greater daily fan growth (0.47% versus 0.23%) and daily growth in People Talking About This (0.94% vs. 0.90%). However, Lyft is posting more per day (2 posts/day versus 0.29 for Uber) and seeing a high volume of interactions.

With such a vastly larger Facebook following, why is it that Uber is losing out to Lyft in interactions? To dig deeper, we used our visualizer feature to plot Uber’s number of Facebook posts, Page likes, and average interactions per post from January to the present.

Uber on Facebook: Number Posts, Page Likes, and Average Interactions Per Post Over Time

We can see from the graph above that while Uber has consistently gained more Likes on their Facebook page (purple), their average interactions per post (orange) have stagnated since an early spike in January, despite an overall upward trend in posting frequency (blue).

Which post caused that spike in interactions, you might ask? This one.

With over 41.50 times as many social interactions as their average Facebook post, Uber’s announcement of its expanded UberX price drop set a high bar for audience engagement on the network.

Data Scientists, Start Your Engines

Given that Lyft recently snagged Chris Pouliot, the former data science lead at Netflix, you can bet they will be making a major data-driven play in the near future. (Read more on Netflix’s battle with HBO here).

As Pouliot told Venture Beat last December, there is certainly ample opportunity for data to influence the car sharing experience, from the dispatch algorithm to the user experience:

“Lyft isn’t doing anything interesting with all its social data. But imagine if in the dispatch process, you saw that the driver and passenger have a common interest and use that when making the connection decision, showing them that there are common interests.”

If you ask us, a proactive approach to marketing data couldn’t hurt either.

Are you ready to get your data in the fast-lane? Start tracking your competitors with TrackMaven!